Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a common neuron degenerative disease affecting elderly people worldwide. A hundred years since the first description of AD, neither conclusive molecular pathology nor curable strategy has been made about it. To make the valuable information easily accessible to the AD research community, the team led by Prof. Hongxing Lei at Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Science developed the AlzBase, a biological knowledge database for the better understanding of gene functions in AD pathogenesis. This integrative database is freely available on the web.

AlzBase is expected to provide as much information on AD gene dysregulation as possible. As with more independent evidence comes higher confident level, the frequency of gene dysregulation is a reliable index for dysregulated gene screening. The core information that AlzBase provides is the frequency of gene dysregulation among AD brain transcriptome datasets. Further, AlzBase provides gene dysregulation information on AD blood transcriptome and other related neuron degenerative diseases which could be valuable for AD biomarker screening. Besides, a wealth of gene annotation and gene regulation information is integrated into AlzBase.

AlzBase is designed to be easily accessed and flexibly retrieved. Therefore, query against the database can be made in single mode, batch mode or advanced mode. Frequency of gene dysregulation for a list of genes can be retrieved simply by batch mode search. Advance mode enables users to search against user specified datasets.

AD is a progressive disease, thus, information on gene-disease state correlation is of great importance. AlzBase includes this sort of information in its correlation search tool. A list of 109 top ranked dysregulated genes which show high connectivity on the co-expression network is available on the website as well.